Facts about Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Some facts about the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, whose
files were opened to the public Tuesday.

FOUNDED: Created by legislative act in 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme
Court's decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education outlawed segregated
schools.

MISSION: The Legislature created the commission to "protect the
sovereignty of the State of Mississippi and her sister states" from federal
government interference. In practice, it worked to preserve a segregated society
and to oppose school integration. In secret, the commission harassed and spied
on activists, branding many of them racial agitators and communist infiltrators.

MEMBERSHIP: The commission had 12 appointed members, including state
lawmakers and gubernatorial appointees. The governor, lieutenant governor,
speaker of the House of Representatives and attorney general were ex-officio
members; each governor served as commission chairman.

STAFF: At its first meeting, the commission hired an executive director to
oversee daily operations. Its first investigators were a former chief of the
Mississippi Highway Patrol and a former FBI agent. The commission also hired a
full-time public relations director to devise projects that would portray
Mississippi in a favorable light.

BUDGET: The state granted the commission $250,000 a year in operating
expenses.

AUTHORITY: The commission had subpoena power, but there is no indication it
was ever used. The commission also had legal authority to keep its records and
files secret. Violation of the secrecy provision could result in a $100 fine and
six months in jail.

GATHERING INFORMATION: The commission staff collected information through its
own agents, a network of spies, through exchanges with law enforcement agencies
and by working with the white supremacist Citizens Council. It also subscribed
to newspapers and magazines from around the country. From 1960 through 1964, the
commission gave the Citizens Council, a private organization, more than $190,000
in tax money.

CLOSED: The commission officially closed in 1977, four years after then-Gov.
Bill Waller vetoed funding.

LEGAL ISSUES: State lawmakers in 1977 ordered the files sealed until 2027.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued, and in 1989 U.S. District Judge William
H. Barbour Jr. ordered the state to open the records. Legal challenges over
privacy issues delayed the release nine more years.

FILES: The records opened Tuesday contain more than 132,000 documents and an
estimated 87,000 names, some of which may be improper spellings of the same name
or nicknames. The names of 42 people will remain private until their deaths, a
provision allowed under federal court order.

PREPARATION: All documents have been electronically reproduced and indexed
and will be available only on computer. The effort by the state Department of
Archives and History took four years and cost almost $600,000.

Copyright 1998& The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) After the disappearance of three civil rights workers
during Mississippi's Freedom Summer, local lawmen complained to the state's
segregationist Sovereignty Commission of being elbowed out of the investigation
by FBI agents who considered them suspects.

A sheriff who is forever linked to the murders of the three young men even
confided to commission investigators that he expected to be arrested.

The revelations were included in more than 132,000 previously secret files
made public Tuesday under federal court order.

In its heyday, the agency's investigators and snitches flooded the commission
with every conceivable tidbit of fact and fiction on groups and individuals they
considered communists or threats to white rule.

Reports filed from June 1964 to January 1965 by commission investigator A.L.
Hopkins quote angry lawmen in Neshoba County, where the three men were murdered,
complaining bitterly of being kept out of the loop.

As early as July 2, 1964 33 days before the bodies would be found Sheriff
Lawrence Rainey told Hopkins he expected to be picked up by the FBI as a suspect
in the disappearance of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Chaney, of Meridian, and New Yorkers Schwerner and Goodman disappeared June
21 after going to investigate a fire at Mount Zion Methodist Church in Sandtown,
a community in the central Mississippi county.

Their bodies were found Aug. 4, buried in a dirt dam a few miles from the
church.

Four months later, Rainey and Chief Deputy Cecil Price were behind bars,
charged with conspiracy. Seven Ku Klux Klansmen, including Price and Imperial
Wizard Sam Bowers of Laurel, were convicted of federal civil rights violations
in the deaths. They received prison terms ranging from three to 10 years.

None served more than six years, and the state of Mississippi never brought
murder charges. Rainey was never convicted of a crime in the case that inspired
the film "Mississippi Burning."

The documents provide a chilling look at the state's segregated past.

Born of fears that followed federally ordered school integration, the
Sovereignty Commission was created in 1956. The agency outwardly extolled racial
harmony, but it secretly paid investigators and spies to gather both information
and misinformation.

The Legislature created the commission to "protect the sovereignty of
the State of Mississippi and her sister states" from federal government
interference. In practice, it worked to preserve a segregated society and to
oppose school integration.

The 12-member commission was disbanded in 1977, and state lawmakers ordered
its files sealed until 2027. In 1989, a federal judge ordered the records
opened, though legal challenges delayed their release for nine years.

Its secrets had been locked away in the vaults of the state Department of
Archives & History until this week.

Now journalists and historians are examining documents that show a
mind-boggling, tedious observation of the daily lives of the commission's
victims.

Some of the files border on the ridiculous lists of license tag numbers,
where someone bought chicken feed, grades earned in World Geography and U.S.
History, even the registration number on a birth certificate.

But the files on the Neshoba County murders were anything but frivolous.

Records speak of FBI bribes and threats to get leads into the disappearance,
and portray an investigation dominated by the FBI to the humiliation of local
and state law officers.

"The actions and methods of members of the Justice Department,
especially the FBI, in the course of their current investigation ... in my
opinion, amounts to encroachment and usurpation of the rights and powers
reserved to this state," Hopkins wrote in one memo.

"In the 21 years that I have been active as an officer and investigator,
I have never witnessed an investigation by the FBI where they came into an area
and completely took charge as they have in this case."

One of Hopkins' first reports on the three workers was in March 1964, when he
was asked to check the background of a new voting rights worker who had shown up
in Meridian. The worker turned out to be Schwerner.

Within three months, Hopkins was checking on a church fire in Neshoba County
for the commission and ultimately into the deaths of the three civil rights
workers.

And a month later, Hopkins had joined Rainey and Price in complaining about
the FBI's tactics, including its failure to inform the sheriff's office when
Schwerner's burned-out Ford Fairlane station wagon was found June 23.

"Sheriff Rainey resented the attitude of the FBI agents at the scene of
the car burning and their lack of cooperation with him in the entire
investigation," Hopkins wrote July 3.

Over the next two months, Hopkins reported the FBI was offering bribes of up
to $1 million to get information. Rainey's admission to Hopkins came during this
period.

"Sheriff Rainey advised me that he expected to be arrested by the FBI at
any time; in fact, he had already called (state) Attorney General Joe T.
Patterson to ascertain the procedure in making bond after he is arrested,"
Hopkins said.

All the while, Hopkins speculated that the parties who told the FBI about the
burned car and ultimately the location of the bodies "must have been
involved in some way either as a witness or as a participant in the crime."

Hopkins tried to keep commission members up to date on developments.

On Aug. 6, he reported that agents had been led to the grave by Olen Burrage,
who owns the property where the dam stood. That information, he wrote, came from
an informant identified only as "M."

In the same file, however, Hopkins cited another commission spy who told him
the FBI informant was an alcoholic "sleeping off" a drunk in the woods
when he was awakened by the commotion of the burial.

In a Dec. 8 report, Hopkins said yet another spy told him of a third possible
informant James Edward Jordan of Gulfport, one of those arrested.

That memo also summarized the sad conclusion of the FBI, that "the plot
to kill Schwerner was formulated over a period of several weeks and Chaney and
Goodman just happened to be along when he was murdered."

Copyright 1998& The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistribute